Tetsuo: The Iron Man - 鉄男

Shinya Tsukamoto

NYAFF 15th Anniversary Screening

This film has no current screenings

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Shinya Tsukamoto

1989

Japan

Japanese with English subtitles

67 minutes

We’re using our 15th Anniversary as an excuse to screen a 27-year-old film we’ve never shown before, but since when did we follow any rules? This hard-rocking audio-visual bullet to the brain puts the punk in cyberpunk and we have wanted to show it for years—so why not now? Shinya Tsukamoto’s black-and-white, pulsing, heavy-metal nightmare is about a man who is driven insane with pleasure when he sticks a piece of metal into his leg, and a salaryman who wakes up with metal spikes growing out of his cheek. From there on it’s all swooning lo-fi cinematography, drill penises, and some of the most nightmarish imagery ever put on film. It was unlike anything that had ever come out of Japan, and upon its release, Tetsuo wiped the floor with all other Japanese movies, spawned two sequels, and made Tsukamoto one of world cinema’s biggest stars. We’d say it’s like David Lynch’s Eraserhead remade by David Cronenberg, but that doesn’t even begin to describe the high weirdness this movie will cause to explode out of your brain like a biomechanical orgasm.

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